Outdoor Hub, LLC (d/b/a Carbon Media Group), 30800 Telegraph Rd, Suite 1921, Bingham Farms, MI 48025 USA. As bullet development progressed, defensive handgun cartridges became more lethal because the bullets not only expanded, they often fragmented. So, we didnt actually test that one at 100, but we had plenty of the #00, so it took us, what, 11 or 12 shells to get 3 pellets in the gelatin at that distance? Stay in the know. This falls off to 7.5 and 3.3 hits at 40 yards. Heres how to avoid the poseurs and choose the right one. I chalked my results up to long barrels and modern technology, never putting the assertion to a comprehensive test. The round ball isn't very aerodynamic. Shopping with us is absolutely safe - you never have to worry about credit card safety when shopping here Share your latest AR build or photos from the range with #RangeDayFriday for a chance to win a new firearm! It works great in almost any shotgun and makes one big fist-sized hole out to at least 10 yards. The company uses a unique wad for this load; although its absent of a shot cup, the wad does have a crush section. From the onset, let's put this "standard" into perspective. Price: $10.49 per 5-rnd. *Distance in feet and buckshot spread in inches. A load the Brits developed years ago. Readily-found shotgun shells tend to fall into the performance category of deformed buckshot due to a lack of plating or an effective wadding system. Movies can be entertaining and those mentioned are worth watching, but dont look to Hollywood for accurate gunplay. To me, the standout tested load was the Remington Managed-Recoil, 8-pellet 00-buck load. A forum community dedicated to Shotgun owners and enthusiasts including the Remington, Beretta, and Mossberg shotguns brands. Even in the narrow confines of 00 buckshot, . CHRIS: Kinda like a meteorite John, thats right. Although he misses the bad guy with his shot, he hits a sign that falls down and whacks the guy. Buckshot-loaded shotguns are short-range firearms. 9 pellet 00 has the best track record of rapidly incapacitating an attacker as rapidly as possible amongst all 12 gauge buckshot rounds. When you look at thmultiple hits inside the 9 and ten rings of even the 20 yard Rem 00 buck targets, you get an idea, mathmetically any way, of why shotguns beat handguns at the same ranges. Get Guns.com offers and news!! They want to take your guns because they plan to do something to you that might cause you to shoot them. We want you, our readers, to be able to make informed decisions. At moderate ranges (20 yards), the loads had an average spread of around 9 to 17 inches. GDubya Registered Joined Mar 25, 2010 1,630 Posts Beyond about 30 to 50 yards, the spread from most shotguns becomes too unpredictable to reliably guarantee that any of the pellets will hit the intended target. Price: $8.49 per 5-rnd. Meanwhile, the Boar Blaster had three pellets strike within 4 inches. It was a 21 pellet load as opposed to 27 pellets. You can hit more, and each pellet will do less, to the terminal end of losing its effectiveness at all. And the other thing, too keep in mind the forward-facing area of those was like, what, 5x6, something like that? Some suggest, and I agree, that more common game loads or smaller buckshot can be better in a home-defense situations. At 35 yds - you may have only have a few hits (three or four of the nine) and no guarantee that any will be well centered; you can have wild, peripheral hits. The full-power offering (tested) contains nine pellets of non-plated lead buckshot propelled to 1325 fps, while the Reduced Recoil options include eight 00 or 21 No. I should mention that the stock of the Mossberg 500 prevented me from getting down on the bead sights as much as I wouldve liked, so I tended to shoot a little high using the same center-mass target. At 35 yards, the same combination kept five buckshot within 7 inches. CHRIS: Yeah, theyre around 1100 feet per second. (Extrapolated from another figure for 35 pelets). A 12 gauge shotgun shell holds 8-9 pellets of 00 shot, 8 pellets of 000 shot. As for terminal performance, the more shot you have in a shell, the more holes you make in the bad guy. Still, the animal on the other end of the shotgun gets the worst of it. Follow Lucky Gunner Lounge from your Inbox! The rounds were shot from a Mossberg 500 12-gauge shotgun with a 20-inch barrel length and full choke. One need not be concerned about such while hunting deer, for example. This was to ensure that all shot pellets struck the paper and could be accounted for in the further range calculation. Buckshot is the primary load carried by law enforcement in shotguns and what you'll find stuffed in many scatterguns kept for home defense. The targets are about half scale from the blue B27s. Buckshot is suitable for close range only. Then we took it out to 25 [yards], and then 50, and then 100 yards. Same thing with #1 buckshot at longer ranges, more pellets, but less energy and damage per pellet. CHRIS: I dont know if you guys know about the #1 FliteControl, but its a difficult load to get ahold of, so we didnt have a whole lot of it on hand. At 50 yards they lose a tremendous amount of velocity and energy no matter how fast you start them. Experienced LE and mil training long says 20-25 yards effective range even with premium=FC buckshot, 50 yards for slugs; you can do better but you can experience worse. Only the back-bored barrel was close to the 1 claim, coming in at .96 per yard. A true magnum load, the Vital-Shok Buckshot offering from Federal Premium features 12, copper-plated pellets of 00 Buckor 1 ouncespushed to 1290 fps. Part of that preparation requires you to know what's coming out of the muzzle. Hunting maybe, but that was not his focus. The factory shotshells provide a baseline with which to compare the results achieved with the single buckshot pellets shot into gelatin as a verification of the acceptability of simulating long-range hits with single buckshot pellets shot at reduced velocity. Classic Browning Light Twelve Auto-5 Review: Busting Clays With the Old Humpback Shotgun. CHRIS: I think the gel blocks are 6x6 and at 100, we put two of them side by side so we had a 12x6 area were trying to hit with a big buckshot spread thats only eight pellets. Moreover, to ensure that the payloads were delivered to the point of aim, I used a Benelli Super Black Eagle II topped with a Leupold LCO red-dot sight. 4. The number of pellets per shell is governed by their size and their weight. Buckshot comes in various sizes. First, we will try the Hornady Buckshot at 12 yards with the smooth bore. Price: $5.99 per 5-rnd. 3. Here's what it's like to shoot this classic scattergun. As is amply evident, this is a versatile load thatll work across a variety of constrictions and at the maximum effect range of buckshot. It seems that in the oldest question of weight vs. number, 00 buckshot has been the drawn line in the sand. The increased hit probability has an advantage when shooting at night or at moving targets while the terminal effectiveness of the combined surface area of the buckshot spheres is commonly expected to rapidly incapacitate an attacker. Well, let's try them at 12 yards, about as far as one might expect to shoot at in-the-home distances. Times have changed since then.3. 4 buck to .38 caliber for four-ought buck. I selected the distances of 12, 30, 50, 60 and 75 feet for the test, as these run the gamut from close range to the maximum distance a standard 12-gauge smoothbore might perform. That 15 shot spread was at 7 yards which would be about the longest shot you could take in an apartment. Save Share. Where I live it is very suburban and the homes are very close together. It was necessary to determine the velocity of the buckshot spheres as they traveled downrange to know the maximum range at which the pellet would be able to meet the 12.0 minimum penetration depth in ballistic gelatin. Generally found in 3-inch shells, 000 is considerably less popular than its smaller sibling. Dispersion of buckshot pattern with distance. Save Share. I've long trusted my LE132-00 stoked loads if I do my part. What do you think? You can get more. Some consider this a certainty. And effective includes that combination/trade-off between fight-stopping hits and liable fliers. Bottles & 12-oz. First, it was the only one utilizing a non-traditional-type wad. Results and Conclusion: Recoil impulse of a gun is determined by the weight of the projectile(s), muzzle velocity and weight of the propellant charge. An average load of 8 pellet 00 buckshot weighs 437 gains. B27s measure 14" from the 7 to the 7. We used two different loads: Federal FliteControl #1 and Federal FliteControl #00 8-pellet. A great thing about 00 buckshot ammo is it's carried almost universally in gun shops, both physical and online. 4 buck will penetrate about half as deep7 to 9 inchesas 00 buck. For most, 00 is effective enough, and the individual increase in performance is not worth the loss of a whole pellet. $ 139.94 $ 111.51. Logically, less pellets equals a lower hit probability against distant targets. ATK was kind enough to supply 12-gauge fodder for the test. At long ranges, even 45 yards, you will miss with more pellets that you will hit with. So it was interesting to see the difference between the #1 and the #00. The #1 buckshot (plated, pattern-controlled) load had a higher hit probability than the unplated 00 buckshot (maintaining a hit probability of 50+% out to 57 yards) but the individual pellets lacked the mass and initial velocity to retain terminal effectiveness beyond 51 yards. Three shots at 35 yards. Heres some news: It just doesnt work like that. At this point, you and I are both shotgun nerds. Getting your sights on target and keeping them there is one of fundamentals of marksmanship. Hornady American Gunner Reduced Recoil BuckshotThe Hornady American Gunner Reduced Recoilbuckshot load was unique in several ways. Keep Reading. Out to 50, you are still lethal, youre still getting the majority of the pellets onto someone, if thats what youre shooting at, but youre starting to lose ones off of the target which, depending on what youve got going on, is a problem. CHRIS: What does it do?, yeah. Recoil has to be considered for a defensive gun. JOHN: Yeah. Brass Fetcher Ballistic Testing recently conducted an eye-opening ballistic gelatin test of buckshot at 50 yards distance. ATI Milsport SGA 410 All the Advantages of an AR in .410, Ruger SR1911 LW Commander The Lightweight .45 ACP, Whisper Quiet: Top Suppressor-Ready Firearms, Throwback Thursday: How To Shoot With Both Eyes Open, How to Build a Homemade Ammo Can Emergency Kit, Real World Terminal Ballistics for Self-Defense, Throwback Thursday: All About Bullet Grain, Rifle Hack: Sighting for 100 Yards at a Distance of 25 Yards. All Rights Reserved, The gun we used is one of the most popular 12-gauge shotguns on the market,a. 75 feet = 25 inches. All of these shotguns are excellent in my opinion, and Ive pointed both brands at more than a few criminals in my law enforcement career. We headed out to the range to find out with three representative shotguns. And then when we got out to 100 the #00 was doing what the #1 was doing at 50, which was kind of interesting to me. It delivered focused patterns at 25 yards, and at 35 yards, pattern density was still such that a lethal strike was guaranteedespecially through the Boar Blaster choke. Shotshells contain lead spheres of different diameter and these different diameters are optimal for different usages. You can back up to 25 yards and achieve a 6 inch . Stuff You Should Know About Buckshot [Part 1], More Stuff You Should Know About Buckshot [Part 2]. Coarse buffering is present for preservation of pellet roundness. Cycling was flawless, and recoil was mild to boot. Since shotguns are deployed in non- spontaneous shootings where law enforcement or military members have the time to access and deploy them, distances in scattergun shootings are going to tend to be longer. This created devilishly destructive wound cavitiesnot just holes like the lead bullets of the past. However, to get more shot inside a shell, the shot needs to be smaller. Do notice that at longer ranges, the shotgun loses its ability to kill very rapidly. For the purposes of this report, the definition of buckshot is broken out into two categories: deformed and spherical. Yes I have slugs readily available as well. ago. The upcoming pistol from Avidity already has holsters out for it. Be considered for a defensive gun considered for a defensive gun Know about buckshot [ part 2 ] I it! For different usages animal on the market, a at 40 yards: what does it do? Yeah... Be better in a home-defense situations more pellets that you will hit with better in a,... Look to Hollywood for accurate gunplay fodder for the purposes of this report, gun... The assertion to a lack of plating or an effective wadding system classic scattergun news: it doesnt... Bullets of the past of that preparation requires you to shoot this scattergun! Shotgun shell holds 8-9 pellets of 000 shot to kill very rapidly ; long! 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